Part of what’s great about being Clint Eastwood is that you can spend a shitload of money on making movies that need to be made, rather than movies that will make back the money.

I mean, Eastwood’s 77. He shows up at your dinner party with Steven Speilberg and they say he’s going to make two pictures about Iwo Jima. Everyone starts writing checks. That’s just how it goes.

‘Flags’ is more of a movie than ‘Letters From Iwo Jima.’ It’s got a real narrative arc, which is ironic because it’s being critical of the narrative imposed on WWII. It guides you by the hand through the valley of darkness, where on one side is the meaninglessness of war and the bullshit by those who wage it, and on the other is the sappy, overbearing hope and dreams of a nation which has been spared having to stare the tragedy of war in the face on a daily basis.

So it’s ambiguous, and bravo. It’s a big giant question mark, and that makes me glad to be an American. But the problem is that only Clint Eastwood gets to put that question mark at the end of the sentence, because he, himself, is a sort of American myth. People can imagine him as Dirty Harry or the High Plains Drifter or Blondie, and it’s OK for any of those three guys to talk about violence and heroism and bullshit in ambiguous terms.

The movie’s entertaining, and sad, and is a tragic spectacle. It’s also interesting to see how this movie and ‘Letters’ fit together. Things happen off-screen in both movies that happen on screen in the other, and some of them are kind of major points. Very violent, because, well… War.

I want to compare these two movies to ‘Thin Red Line,’ but I’ll wait for film school to go to the effort.

Where are we? Again we turn to Glenn Greenwald, who shows us a poll, which says that only 46% of Americans believe that attacks on civilians are never justified. We score worse than Morocco, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and… Iran.

In maybe too much fairness, we’re about even with Morocco. The rest beat us by 30 points or better.

What really creeps me out, though, is the 27% of Americans who think attacking civilians is ‘rarely’ justified, and the 19% who say ‘sometimes.’ How can targeting civilians be ‘rarely’ or ‘sometimes’ justified? Answer: They hadn’t really ever thought it through. If you live in any of those other places, you very likely have a definite opinion on the targeting of civilians for political gain. If you live in the US, however, it’s not even an issue.

This is a good thing, in a way, because it means we’ve avoided much of the violence of other places. But it’s bad, in a way, because it means we’re able to justify such action, having never experienced its horror on a regular basis.

Greenwald goes on to talk about the creeping totalitarianism in the GOP, which he’s been seeing for a while, and which I’ve been seeing since the ’80s.

BTW: Xanga ghods… No tags. Tags no work. Editor behavior changed. What gives?

Thoreau: 6th cousin, 4 times removed (through Elizabeth Lock, 1580-1650)

Twain (Clements): 7th cousin, 1 time removed (through Hancock Lee, 1653-1709)

But surely this takes the cake:

What fun.

SuSu linked to an article over at Salon, wherein Gary Kamiya gets it:

But there’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.

Ba-da-bing. We are Bush and Bush is us. We can’t find it within ourselves to reject ourselves.

This doesn’t mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we’re too confused — not least by our own complicity — to work up the cold, final anger we’d need to go through impeachment. We haven’t done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy — not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

This is one reason critics of the war were so vehemently and violently opposed. People who were right about the war, and were right about the ‘war on terror,’ have been vilified because no one likes a told-you-so. And in the metaphor of marriage, no one wants to be the cuckolded spouse.

Over the past few days, I’ve watched a few movies.

I wanted to rent a bunch of Peter Cook movies, because I remembered being a little kid and seeing ‘Hounds of the Baskervilles’ on a Saturday afternoon TV matinee.

I ended up with “Whoops, Apocalypse!”, because “Those Daring Young Men In Their Jaunty Jalopies” wasn’t available. But, since I was in the neighborhood in the video store, I got “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes.” Yes, that’s the title. The movie’s long, too. Released in 1965.

Also, because they were in the new releases: “Afro Samurai,” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the connection.

“Afro Samurai” is an anachronistic hip-hop/samurai animé revenge tale, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. It’s kind of suck. And if you have cable TV, you knew this already, and you wouldn’t have rented it. Initially, the premise holds promise, but if you’re looking for something beyond the charm of hyperkinetic psychedelic samurai who talk like they’re gangsta rappers and black preachers, then you’re in the wrong place. Note also that it’s set up as five episodes, with commercial breaks still in place (though no commercials, of course). Avoid, or get “Samurai Champloo” instead.

“Whoops, Apocalypse!” is supposed to be an “Airplane!”-like wacky take on global geopolitics during the darkest days of the cold war. And some of it is funny, like for instance, the end credits (there’s a credit for “Little girl who gets punched in the face ha ha ha”). But mostly it’s just tired. Michael Richards does a heroic job of holding this movie together, as the ubiquitous assassin. And yes, the rumors are true: He appears in blackface. And, of course, Peter Cook is outstanding as the insane Prime Minister of Britain.

Note that “Whoops, Apocalypse!” is only available on PAL-format DVD, and reg’lar ol’ VHS, so you’ll have to hunt around if you want to see it. Not that I’d recommend you do, of course…

“Letters from Iwo Jima.” I mean, wow. Just a big spectacle which is always just out of view around a corner from where we’re watching these Japanese soldiers struggle with themselves and each other. It’s an honest view of war, from the perspective of those who lost the battle. I haven’t seen “Flags of our Fathers,” which is the flip-side movie to this one, but I have to assume that both movies are something of an attempt to re-write the myths surrounding this battle, and surrounding the war in general. “Letters…” seems to be trying to undo 50 years of dehumanization, which is laudable, but it turns the traditionalist Japanese officers into the bad guys, with the US-educated officers as sympathetic, approachable characters. So while I appreciate the attempt, I think the subtext is that if you were educated in the US, Eastwood likes you and you get to be a good guy. So while I’m impressed with the filmmaking and the attempt to tie all this up into a narrative, it ends up reinforcing the thing it’s trying to break. Perhaps there are limits to the rehabilitation of some national stories.

“Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines” is way more fun than I remember. And it has actual flying machines. It’s really quite a technical achievement, and the fact that the ‘plot’ exists only to connect comedy bits or footage of flying machines is forgiveable.

Dude wanted to napalm protestors at Jerry Falwell’s funeral. But here’s a happy last line:

No national Republicans attended Tuesday’s funeral, including none of the GOP presidential candidates. All said they were too busy.

Update: Max Blumenthal walks you through it:

The Christian right has warped religious doctrine to advance a Utopian political worldview that promises to purify the land of liberal decadence. Through one of its flagship universities, the Christian right produced a terrorist. Their hysterical warnings of the threat of radical Islam sound increasingly like projections.

As you can see, the optics are stunning.

This installation always annoys me because I’d have put them swimming up the hill, more spaced-out. And I wouldn’t have included a path. But I guess I’m not in control of such things, am I?

They’re fins from decomissioned nuclear submarines. This is the peace dividend.

I’ve got a picture from my QuickTake 150 that I got for $2. Warning: Mac geek stuff follows.

Here’s the camera:

It delivers a maximum resolution of 640×480, which was a Big Deal in 1995, I suppose. It has no image display. It only tells you how many pictures it’s taken and how many remain. You can tell it to give you 320×240 as well, for a maximum of 32 images in the camera at a time.

If you want to get those images, you need software called PhotoFlash, which is easy enough to find out there on the intarwebz. You also need a serial cable, which I didn’t have, but which I obtained almost by accident at a thrift store.

And then, after that, you need a Mac that can run PhotoFlash. It just so happens that I have a Quadra 950 that I use as furniture. I set my remote controls on it, along with beer and snacks, when I’m watching movies. But today, the Quadra 950 is a convenient docking station:

This image was taken with the QuickTake 150. Note the very scientific mouse pad and convenient access to the serial cable. The whole QuickTake system says, ‘Convenience!’

The Quadra has 16 megs of RAM, and has a 350 meg hard drive. It runs Mac System 7.5.

First things first: Get the PhotoFlash software to the Quadra.

Let’s try floppy disks. I have a pile of old floppies, and a USB floppy drive for just such an occasion. Except it would never work; either the files were compressed using software not available on the Quadra, or the uncompressed disk images were too big.

So then I did what I should have done to begin with: I tried file sharing. Setting up the Quadra as the server was a no-go. But then it worked if I turned on sharing on my Mac OS X Tiger -running laptop! W00t! I could connect and get files from the laptop to the Quadra.

I decompressed the files on the laptop and then shot the disk images over to the Quadra, which then mounted them perfectly. I could install PhotoFlash.

Then it came time to test PhotoFlash, which worked just fine. Except for one thing: You have to run an AppleScript to get the image from the camera. I mean, that’s not a bad thing, really, but it’s less than intuitive.

So I had the above image staring at me on the Quadra’s screen, and I saved it out as a TIFF, and then tried to drag and drop it back into the laptop shared folder….. Which killed the connection every time I tried.

Now, for FTP, I use a piece of software called Interarchy. Back in the System 7 days, it was called Anarchie (because it was an archie client). And I feel really old now because I know that, and because I knew where to look for an old version of Anarchie to put on the Quadra. (I also remembered that you can open up Anarchie’s preferences, click the ‘I paid’ checkbox, it says “Thank you,” and never shows you the nag screen again.) Anyway, it’s a case of brand loyalty; Interarchy works like the Finder, and can do ssh with remote keys. It keeps changing hands, though. Every couple of years I get an email saying, “I’m the new owner of Interarchy!”

So turn on the FTP server on my laptop (System Preferences -> Sharing -> click on ‘ftp’), log in using Anarchie, shoot a few files back and forth, and here we are.

Simple as pi.